medieval monks and their world - ideas and realities.pdf

MEDIEVAL MONKS AND THEIR WORLD:

IDEAS AND REALITIES

Studies in Honor of Richard E. Sullivan

EDITED BY

DAVID BLANKS, MICHAEL FRASSETTO AND

AMY LIVINGSTONE

LEIDEN • BOSTON2006

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Cover illustration: Seventeenth-century engraving of the Abbey of St. Riquier. Bibliotheque nationale de France, Estampes collection: VA-80-FOL(7).

This book is printed on acid-free paper

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ISSN 1572–4107ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15463 6ISBN-10: 90 04 15463 9

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C H A P T E R E L E V E N

E a r l y M o d e r n O r i e n t a l i s m :

R e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o fI s l a m i n S i x t e e n t h - a n d

S e v e n t e e n t h - C e n t u r yE u r o p e

D a n i e l J . V i t k u s

The early modern image of Islam—as seen through Western eyes—isone that has been so radically transformed by time, distance, andcultural mediation that it bears little resemblance to the religion and

the culture that it purports to describe. In fact, the representation of Islamin medieval and Renaissance Europe is at times almost the opposite of its al-leged original. Through a process of misperception and demonization, icon-oclasm becomes idolatry, civilization becomes barbarity, monotheismbecomes pagan polytheism, and so on. And yet, these twisted stereotypesare, in a sense, “real.” They are real because, for the vast majority of medievaland early modern Europeans, they served as the only readily available meansfor understanding (or perhaps we should say, misunderstanding) Islam.These representations are also “real” in the sense that any such representa-tion has a material and ideological impact as a historical phenomenon: it is

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a mode of perception that shapes the way people think and therefore the waythey act.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, a pattern of representation begins toemerge from various descriptions of the Islamic Other and its society, cul-ture, religion, et cetera. Some of these medieval representations were crudecaricatures, such as the figure of Mahound, a pagan tyrant or idol that ap-pears in popular medieval drama; but there were also more sophisticated at-tempts to describe Islamic culture or religion and to account for its rise anddevelopment. Many scholars, including Norman Daniel and W. Mont-gomery Watt, have distinguished between the “popular” perception of Is-lamic culture and what has been termed the “learned” account of Islam. Atthe same time that romance tale tellers were recounting the heroic exploitsof Christian knights and crusaders who vanquished sinister Islamic foes,there were those among the educated elites who were studying Islamic the-ology in order to stop its spread by more peaceful means. These theologians’treatments of Islam were often produced as part of a polemical project topromote Christianity and to refute Islam. Medieval scholars such as Ricoldoda Monte Croce, Mark of Toledo, Ramon Lull, Ramon Marti, Peter theVenerable, Robert of Ketton, and Hermann of Dalmata, all of them monksor clerics, translated, described, and denounced Islam from the perspectiveof medieval scholasticism.1 But even their learned descriptions of Islamic re-ligion are often distortions or fabrications, depicting Islam as heresy or fraudand Muhammad as an impostor. These medieval accounts of Islam form animportant foundation, comprising an entire tradition of polemical misrep-resentation, for the attitudes taken later by early modern theologians, bothProtestant and Catholic.

Why the persistent misrepresentation of Islam, in spite of the availabilityof more accurate information about Muslim society and theology? The an-swer is simple: it was the perceived threat of Islam to Christianity that pro-duced the denial or the radical distortion of what Islam really was. From theperspective of Christendom, Islam was an aggressively expanding, competingform of monotheism that sought to subsume and overrule the Gospel ofChrist, just as the Christians claimed to have supplanted Judaism by “fulfill-ing” the Judaic law of the Old Testament. The Islamic claim to supersede aflawed and incomplete Christianity was an unthinkable phenomenon, and soit was denied in various ways, including, in both learned and popular treat-ments, a definition of Islam as a “pagan” misbelief akin to other forms of idol-atrous paganism that Western Europeans associated with the Middle East.

The demonization of the Islamic East is a long and deeply rooted tradi-tion in the West—spanning the centuries, from the early medieval period tothe end of the twentieth century. It harks back to ancient representations ofEastern empires and invading hordes that predate Islam, including the As-

D A N I E L J . V I T K U S

syrians and the Persians of the ancient world. The classical and biblicalstereotypes that were established in the collective consciousness of the Westwere further shaped and solidified later by the historical experience of “holywar” that began with the rise of Islam, continued during the period of thecrusades, and endured in the era of Spanish Reconquista and Ottoman im-perialism. In Western Europe, a long history of military aggression and cul-tural competition (taking place primarily, but not entirely, in theMediterranean basin) served as the basis for the prevailing conception of theIslamic “Orient” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Looking back at the cultural history of Europe, we find a distortedimage of Islam first recorded in medieval romances and chivalric “legends”describing armed conflict between Christian and Saracen knights. Thesetexts are generally considered today to be “fictional” and “literary” forms,but it is important to keep in mind that the category of “literature,” as it ispopularly defined today, did not come into being until the nineteenth cen-tury. For premodern readers and audiences, the distinction between storyand history, fiction and fact, legend and chronicle, was not a clear one—ifit existed at all. What may appear to us now as an obvious fiction was oncereceived knowledge. For example, romance narratives about chivalricChristian heroes fighting evil Saracen knights, which we might dismisstoday as mere fairy tales, were undoubtedly received as “true stories” bymost of their audience. Romance tales and legends, including the chansonsde geste, late medieval romances like Alexandre du Pont’s Roman de Ma-homet (1258) and Sir Beues of Hamtoun (ca. 1300), as well as early moderntexts such as Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), exhibit whatDorothee Metlitzki has called “The assemblage of myth, legend, fact, andpropaganda . . . in the literary encounter between Christians and Sara-cens.”2 Metlitzki’s description of these texts is an accurate assessment fromthe perspective of a modern critic, but the medieval audience would havebeen far less skeptical. Although the romances and legends featuring Is-lamic enemies are imaginative, nostalgic rewritings of historical events suchas the military exploits of Carolingian Franks or twelfth-century crusaders,these legends, to some degree, comprise a record of the competition andconflict between European-Christian and Arab-Islamic culture. In any case,they record for us a deformed image of Islam that was received as a true oneby many Europeans, even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus,there existed even in the medieval and early modern periods a kind of “ori-entalism” that demonized the Islamic Other.

The orientalist discourse described by Edward Said was not “born”with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 17983: it began to emerge in an erawhen the European relationship to the Orient was not yet one of colonialdominance—when, in fact, that relationship was one of anxiety and awe

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on the part of the Europeans. In fact, as one scholar has pointed out, “ . . .the creation of the distorted image of Islam was largely a response to the cul-tural superiority of the Muslims, especially those of al-Andalus.”4

Before the emergence of capitalism, feudal European society existed inwhat Samir Amin has termed “the peripheral form of the tributary mode:”5

. . . Until the Renaissance, Europe belonged to a regional tributary systemthat included Europeans and Arabs, Christians and Moslems. But the greaterpart of Europe at that time was located at the periphery of this regional sys-tem, whose center was situated around the eastern end of the Mediterraneanbasin.6

During the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, and later,at the time of the Ottoman expansion, the Europeans were dominated by Is-lamic power. While the Christians of Spain, Portugal, England, and othernations were establishing their first permanent colonies in the New World,they faced the threat at home of being colonized by the Ottoman Empire.Thus, the power relations that were in effect in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries are the opposite of those that operated later under Westerncolonial expansion and rule. Many of the images of Islam that were pro-duced by European culture in the early modern period are imaginary reso-lutions of real anxieties about Islamic wealth and might. The ChristianWest’s inferiority complex, which originated in the trauma of the earlyCaliphate’s conquests, was renewed and reinforced by the emergence of anew Islamic power, the Ottoman Turks, who achieved in 1453 what theUmmayad armies had failed to accomplish in 669 and 674—the capture ofConstantinople. A series of Ottoman invasions and victories followed, in-cluding Athens in 1459, Otranto in 1480, Rhodes in 1522, Budapest in1526, and in 1529 when the Turks pushed on and almost took Vienna,Cyprus in 1571, and Crete in 1669.

The importance of the Turkish threat for early modern Europeans canhardly be underestimated. An English writer, Richard Knolles, in his Historyof the Turks (1603), refers to them as “the scourge of God and present terrorof the world.”7 The Turkish scare, which prevailed throughout the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, strongly affected even the English.8 When thenews reached England in 1565 that the Turkish siege of Malta had beenlifted, a “form of thanksgiving” was ordered by the Archbishop of Canterburyto be read in all churches every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday.9 This specialorder of service refers to “that wicked monster and damned soul Mahomet”and “our sworn and most deadly enemies the Turks, Infidels, and Miscre-ants . . . who by all tyranny and cruelty labour utterly to root out not onlytrue religion, but also the very name and memory of Christ our only saviour,


and all Christianity.”10 Five years later, Christians throughout Europe cele-brated and performed prayers of thanks for the victory at Lepanto, but whenthe defeat of the Turkish fleet proved to be only a temporary setback to Ot-toman expansion, a sense of dread returned.

In 1574, Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville traveled together as part ofa foreign mission to Don John of Austria (who had commanded the Chris-tian fleet at Lepanto). During this trip, Sidney wrote to Hubert Longuetfrom Vienna on March 26:

These civil wars which are wearing out the power of Christendom are open-ing the way for the Turk to get possession of Italy; and if Italy alone were indanger, it would be less a subject for sorrow, since it is the forge in which thecause of all these ills are wrought. But there is reason to fear that the flameswill not keep themselves within its frontier, but will seize and devour theneighboring states.11

In the following year, in the dedication to his English translation of Curi-one’s Sarracenicae Historiae, Thomas Newton wrote: “They [the Saracensand Turks] were . . . at the very first very far from our clime and region, andtherefore the less to be feared, but now they are even at our doors and readyto come into our houses. . . .”12 Another English tract on the Turks, printedin 1597, reports that “ . . . the terrour of their name doth even now makethe kings and Princes of the West, with the weake and dismembred reliquesof their kingdomes and estates, to tremble and quake through the feare oftheir victorious forces.”13

Despite such fears about a nightmare scenario of Islamic expansion, theEuropean attitude toward the Ottoman threat was not simply and univer-sally one of fear and loathing (as we see from Sidney’s rather cheerful allu-sion to a possible Turkish conquest of Italy). As long as their RomanCatholic enemies were the ones who were suffering at the hands of the Ot-tomans, it was not, from the Protestant point of view, an altogether negativephenomenon. The Turks were often seen by the Protestants as God’s scourgefor papal pride, and some expressed a hope that the rival powers of Pope andSultan would annihilate each other, leaving a power vacuum that might befilled by an expansion of the Protestant Reformation. This kind of wishfulthinking became part of the apocalyptic rhetoric of radical Protestantism.

Some historians have called the Turks “allies of the Reformation” be-cause the Ottoman campaigns in central Europe helped to divert the mili-tary energies and economic resources of the Papal-Hapsburg powers whowished to root out the Lutherans and other “heretics.”14 In fact, the Turk-ish authorities were more tolerant of Protestantism than were many of theRoman Catholic princes, and Ottoman rule in the Balkans was generally


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less exploitative than that of the Roman Catholic nobles who had heldpower there before the Ottoman invasions. Thus it was that Balkan peas-ants in the sixteenth century used the saying, “Better the turban of the Turkthan the tiara of the Pope.”15 It was the Ottoman threat that forced CharlesV and his German allies to concede freedom of religious practice toLutheran sectarians during the crucial period of the 1520s and 1530s.16

In 1518, Luther had been accused in the papal bull of excommunicationof a heretical opposition to a crusade against the Turks. Luther, like manyother preachers, both Protestant and Catholic, believed that “The Turks arethe people of the wrath of God,” come to scourge Christians for their sins.In his response to the Pope, however, Luther defended the principle that “tofight the Turks is to resist the judgment of God upon men’s sins.” AlthoughLuther’s position may well have been an objection “less to fighting againstthe Turk than to fighting under papal leadership,” it implies that to fight theTurk is to resist the will of God.17 Later, as the Turkish invaders drew closerto Germany, Luther was forced to defend his position. In a series of sermonsand writings on the Turks and their religion, he advocated a united resistanceagainst the Ottoman advance.

Luther’s attitude toward Islam must be seen in light of the Protestant cri-tique of papal authority, and in the context of the Protestant struggle for sur-vival against the Hapsburg effort to stamp out the new heresy. TheProtestant attack on the papal theory of crusade was part of the assault onthe Pope’s prerogative and the Roman Catholic penitential system (especiallythe indulgences that were granted to crusaders). Despite this hostility to thenotion of a holy war led by the Pope, Protestants in England, at least, didnot abandon the principle of a just war, waged by the “common corps ofChristendom” to defend against the predations of the Turkish infidel.18

Drawing upon the language of the Book of Revelation, Protestants oftendescribed the wars against Roman Catholic rule and religion as crusadesagainst the “second Turk,” the Antichrist, or the Eastern “whore of Baby-lon.” In Table Talk, Luther is quoted as saying,

Antichrist is at the same time the Pope and the Turk. A living creature con-sists of body and soul. The spirit of Antichrist is the Pope, his flesh the Turk.One attacks the Church physically, the other spiritually.19

In a 1587 sermon at Paul’s Cross in London, William Gravet, a Protes-tant divine, made a historical claim for the link between Pope and Turk,claiming that “the popes supremacie and Mahumets sect began both aboutone time (as is to be seene in the histories) and that was somewhat more than600 yeeres after Christ . . .” and therefore “Mahumetisme may go cheeke byjoule with them.”20


While Luther and other Protestants compared the Roman Catholicchurch and the pope to Turkish infidels, Catholic polemicists sought to tarProtestants with the same brush. In polemical writings, as well as officialpronouncements, popes, princes, and Roman Catholic clergymen comparedtheir religious duty to fight the Lutheran heresy with their obligation to pur-sue a crusade against Islam.21 In 1526, a proposal for a “general crusade” for“the repelling and ruin . . . of the infidels and the extirpation of theLutheran sect” was included in the Treaty of Madrid signed by Charles Vand Francis I.22 In a 1536 anti-Protestant tract dedicated to Charles V, theEnglish Cardinal Reginald Pole imagined Charles defeating the Turks in acrusade and then returning home, only to find that

new turkes be rysen and sprong up amongst us at home. For what other thingar the turkes than a certain secte of christians, which in tyme past haveshrounk and gone away from the catholyke church . . . ? The orygynall andbegynyng of the turkes relygion is all one with all other heresyes.23

While Protestants and Catholics called each other infidels and Turks, theyboth continued to call for a united crusade against the real Turks. Papists andProtestants alike saw the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic con-trol of Jerusalem as a consequence of God’s judgment upon Christian sin-ners, the manifestation of a providential scheme that had shaped imperialhistory in accordance with the divine will.

In the sixteenth century, incessant warfare between the Christian statesof Europe and religious war in France served to intensify the exhortationsfor Christian unity and a crusade against the Turks. Melanchthon, in thepreface to De origine imperii Turcorum (1560), declares “We behold theTurkish power being extended over the human race while the kings andother princes of Europe dissipate their strength in domestic warfare. In themeantime the Turks move onward.”24 In his Discours Politiques et Militaires,written in prison during the late 1580s, a Huguenot captain, Francis de laNoue, called for a general crusade to unite Catholics and Protestants in aneffort to retake Constantinople.25 During the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, the call for a crusade became a rhetorical formula frequently em-ployed but rarely leading to large-scale military mobilization against theOttomans.26 It was increasingly a subject for imaginative nostalgia ratherthan a concerted action.

A typical sixteenth-century plea for such a holy war occurs in Camoens’sPortuguese epic, Os Lusiados (first published in 1572):

O wretched Christians, are you perchance but the dragon’s teeth that Cadmussowed, that you thus deal death to one another, being all sprung from a common


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womb? Do you not see the Holy Sepulchre in the possession of dogs of infidelswho, strong in their unity, are advancing even against your native soil and cover-ing themselves with glory in the field? You know that with them it is both cus-tom and obligation . . . to hold their restless forces together by waging war onChristian peoples; while among you the Furies never weary of sowing their hate-ful tares.27

Here, the formulaic plea for Christian unity and a crusade against Islam is,ironically, a call to imitate the Turks’ military and moral discipline.

In poetry, in sermons, and in religious polemic, early modern Europeansdemanded an all-out war against the Turks, but at the same time someChristian monarchs were openly allied to the forces of Islam. During the six-teenth century, the French monarchy began a long period of friendly rela-tions with the Grande Porte, and after the Venetians they were the next tobe granted commercial capitulations by the Ottoman sultan.28

In Protestant England, Elizabeth I was to pursue a policy of commercialand military alliance with the Ottoman sultanate, especially during the pe-riod of open hostility to Spain. In 1585 her powerful councilor Walshing-ham instructed William Harborne, the English ambassador to the Sultan, tourge a military alliance between England and the Turks. Walshinghamhoped for a Turkish attack on Spain that would “divert the dangerous at-tempt and designs of [the Spanish] King from these parts of Christen-dom.”29 But more than that, Walshingham expressed the hope that Spainand Turkey, the two “limbs of the Devil,” might weaken each other andallow for “the suppression of them both.”30

Not surprisingly, prophecies of Turkish doom were popular throughoutEurope during the early modern period. These texts often referred to the Bookof Revelation and sometimes identified Muhammad with the Antichrist. Theypredicted 1) the recovery of all lands lost to the Turks, and their conversion toChristianity; or 2) they foretold the ultimate downfall of the Turks, but oftenafter further victories, sometimes including the capture of Italy before theywould be turned back. Many of these prognostications also named a specificmonarch or prince (such as Charles V) as the leader of a victorious crusade.These prophecies had a particularly eager audience in Germany and Italy, butthey were widespread (some even circulated in Istanbul), and Europeans were“fed for generations” on such predictions about the Turks.31

While popular prophecies foretold the downfall of the Ottoman Empire,the fear of a black planet—of mass conversion to Islam—increased in in-tensity. A typical example of the Europeans’ anti-Islamic polemic describesthe Turks as hell-bent “to the enlarging and amplifying of their Empire andreligion, with the dayly accesse of new and continuall conquests by the ruineand subversion of all such kingdomes, provinces, estates and professions, as


are any way astraunged from them either in name, nation, or religion.”32

The Turks seem capable of converting the entire world to their religion:

they doe think . . . that they are bound by all meanes as much as in them lyeth,to amplifie and increase their religion in all partes of the worlde, both by armesand otherwise: And that it is lawfull for them to enforce and compell, to allure,to seduce, and to perswade all men to the embracing of their sect and super-stitions: and to prosecute all such with fire and sword, as shall either opposethemselves against their Religion, or shall refuse to conforme and submit them-selves to their ceremonies and traditions. And this they doe to the intent thename and doctrine of their Prophet Mahomet may bee everywhere, and of allnations, reverenced and embraced. Hence it is that the Turkes doe desire noth-ing more then to drawe both Christians and others to embrace their Religionand to turne Turke. And they do hold that in so doing they doe God good ser-vice, bee it by any meanes good or badde, right or wrong.33

For the early modern Europeans, the idea of “turning Turk” (converting toIslam) was a sensational subject that inspired anxious fascination.34

Interest in the Turks and Islam was on the rise. European readers were of-fered numerous descriptions of the “Great Turk” and his court, and the quan-tity of material printed on the Ottomans, their culture and religion, increasedenormously in the seventeenth century. This vast literature on Islam includesa genre that gained in popularity at this time: captivity narratives describingthe sufferings of Christians who were taken prisoner and enslaved by theTurks or Moors were printed and read throughout Europe. Christian captivesrecounted their endurance of Turkish or Moorish cruelty and their heroic re-fusal to convert.35 In many such accounts, the narrators told of their serviceas galley slaves or laborers. In 1590, for example, the English gunner EdwardWebbe published an account of his capture by the Tartars in Moscow and hissubsequent enslavement in the Crimea and Turkey from 1571 to 1588. Hedescribes the condition of the Christian captives living in Turkey:

[The] poore captives . . . are constrained to abide most vilde and grievoustortures, especially the torture and torment of consciens which troubled meand all true Christians to the very soule: for the Turk by al meanes possiblewould still perswade me and my other fellow Christians while I was there thetime of 13 yeares, to forsake Christ, to deny him, and to believe in their GodMahomet: which if I would have done, I might have had wonderfull prefer-ment of the Turke, and have lived in as great felicitie as any Lord in thatcountrey: but I utterly denyed their request, though by them greevouslybeaten naked for my labour, and reviled in most detestable sort, calling medogge, divell, hellhound, and suchlike names: but I give God thankes he gaveme strength to abide with patience these crosses.36


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There were also numerous printed narratives describing the exploits ofrenegades and pirates who had willingly gone over to join the Moors andbecome part of the privateering communities in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli,Sallee, and other North African ports.37 While these “true stories” aboutcaptives and renegades were being published, fictional texts (including ro-mance narratives, epic poetry, and plays) continued to feature the downfallof “bad Muslims” and the conversion of “good Muslims” to Christianity.38

A stock plot from European romance narrative features a Muslim princesswho falls in love with a Christian knight, opens the castle of her father, theSultan, so that the Christian knights can capture it in a surprise attack; sheconverts, they get married—and the Sultan either converts or is killed.39

On the English stage, in plays such as Robert Daborn’s A Christian Turn’dTurk (1612) and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1624), Christians con-vert to Islam and pay a terrible price for doing so. In the early modern fic-tion of Europe, the only good Muslim is a converted Muslim. Of course,this was contrary to the historical conditions of the time: in fact conversionto Islam was widespread in the Mediterranean while conversion of Muslimsto Christianity was extremely rare.

The account of Islamic religious doctrine and practice produced byearly modern orientalism bears little resemblance to the religion it pur-ports to describe. In popular fiction and drama, pagan Saracens and idol-worshipping Moors alike pay homage to a deity called Mahoun orMahound, who is often part of a heathen pantheon that includes Apollin,Termagant, and other devilish idols. One such representation of these“paynim knights” and their religion is seen in a metrical romance entitledThe Sowdone of Babylon. In this text, when the Sowdone (i.e., “Sultan”)Laban is defeated by the Romans, one of his councilors says to him, “Totell the truth, our gods hate us. Thou seest, neither Mahoun or Apollin isworth a pig’s bristle” and when the Sultan has the idols brought beforehim, he tells them:

Fye upon thee, Appolyn. Thou shalt have an evil end. And much sorrow shallcome to thee also, Termagant. And as for the, Mahound, Lord of all the reste,thou art not worth a mouse’s turd.40

He then has his idols beaten with sticks and thrown out of his tent.Muslims (or “Mahometans,” as they were called) were not only described

as pagans, there was also a tendency to ignore their religious identity in favorof a label that signified a “barbaric” ethnicity. As Bernard Lewis points out:

Europeans in various parts of the continent showed a curious reluctance tocall the Muslims by any name with a religious connotation, preferring to call


them by ethnic names, the obvious purpose of which was to diminish theirstature and significance and to reduce them to something local or even tribal.At various times and various places, Europeans called Muslims Saracens,Moors, Turks, Tartars, according to which of the Muslim peoples they haveencountered.41

The Europeans’ confusion of various Eastern ethnicities and their misun-derstanding of Islamic religious practices were accompanied by a distortedpicture of the Prophet Muhammad. If he was not depicted as an idol, hewas described as a renegade and a fraud, and his religion was denounced asa heresy founded on deceit and spread by violence. Late medieval and earlymodern accounts of the life of the Prophet and the establishment of Islamclaim either that Muhammad was a Roman Catholic cardinal who wasthwarted in his ambition to be elected as pope or that he was a poor cameldriver who learned from a heretical Syrian monk to cobble together a newreligion from fragments of Christian and Jewish doctrine.42 These polemi-cal biographies claim that he seduced the Arabian people by fraudulent“miracles” and black magic, convincing them by means of “imposture” thathe was God’s chosen prophet. The Qurdan was usually described in termsof contempt. The anti-Islamic propaganda directed against the Prophet andhis Book are typified in a polemical dialogue written by William Bedwell,one of the first truly learned Arabists in England. The title of his tract,printed in 1615, gives a sense of the Western European attitude towardIslam: it is called Mohammedis Imposturare: That is, A Discovery of the Man-ifold Forgeries, Falsehoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous seducerMohammed: with a demonstration of the insufficiency of his law, contained inthe cursed Alkoran.

Islam was narrowly defined and caricatured as a religion of violence andlust—aggressive jihad in this world, and sensual pleasure promised in thenext world. But if the doctrines of Islam were so obviously worthy ofscorn, what could account for the widespread, rapid growth of Islam?Force of arms and successful military aggression, violent conversion by thesword—these are often cited by Christian writers in the early modern eraas an explanation for the astonishing achievement of the Islamic con-quests. The early Arab Muslims are described as powerful bandits andplunderers, united by a voracious appetite for booty. According to LeoAfricanus,

. . . there is nothing that hath greatlier furthered the progression of theMahumetan sect, than perpetuitie of victorie, and the greatness of con-quests . . . In that the greatest part of men, yea, and in a manner all, exceptsuch as have fastned their confidence upon the cross of Christ, and setled their


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hope in eternity, follow that which best agreeth with sense, and measure thegrace of God by worldly prosperitie.43

The success of Islam is perversely misinterpreted as a sign of divine grace,and the evil instrument of God’s wrath gains followers who wish to climbaboard the bandwagon of conquest.

For the people of Western Europe, the worldly wealth and power of Islamin the early modern era was both alluring and repellent, fascinating and ter-rifying. The European attitude toward Islam and its people is manifest, notonly in descriptions of Islamic theology or Turkish belligerence, but as partof a whole set of stereotypes found also in literature and art, most of whichrepresent the “oriental” Other as an external enemy. In many fictional nar-ratives, the unity of truth and the survival of Christian virtue are predicatedupon the struggle against a false, evil empire in the East. While depictingIslam and Christianity engaged in a Manichean struggle, the early moderndemonization of Islam tends to focus upon the overwhelming, absolutepower of Islamic culture. In these representations, this unlimited power isoften embodied in an Islamic ruler, a sultan or king whose authority over hissubjects is equated with the power of a master over his slave. It is therefore,by definition, an unjust, tyrannical, and oppressive power.

An interesting example of the Western image of oriental rule can be seenin John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost (first published in 1667). Milton’sdescription in Paradise Lost of the greatest demon of all draws upon the Eu-ropeans’ traditional demonization of Eastern power: Milton’s poem gives usSatan as Sultan, a puissant oriental despot exhorting an evil horde of mil-lions to wage war against God, Christ, and the world. Satan, commandingthe fallen angels to rise from the lake of fire and regroup, is described as“their great Sultan waving to direct/Their course . . . and fill all the plain”(1.348–50). Satan’s demonic followers are repeatedly identified with Easternpagan gods and given their names (Osiris, Isis, Orus, Dagon, Moloch,Thammuz, Belial); and the capital of hell, Pandemonium, is compared withMiddle Eastern cities: “Not Babylon/Nor great Alcairo such magnifi-cence/Equaled in all their glories, to enshrine/Belus or Serapis their gods, orseat/Their kings, when Egypt with Assyria strove for wealth and luxury”(1.717–22). The fallen angels and their leader are described as Saracen war-riors, and the chief hall of their infernal palace is “like a covered field, wherechampions bold/[were] Wont [to] ride in armed, and at the Soldan’schair/Defied the best of paynim chivalry/To mortal combat or career withlance” (1.763–66). Satan is enthroned as a glorious Eastern potentate:

High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth ofOrmus and of Ind,


Or where the gorgeous East with richest handShow’rs on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,Satan exalted sat. . . . (2.1–9)

In Paradise Lost, Evil comes from the East: Satan is an oriental monarch(Lucifer, the shining one—the Eastern morning star) whose proud ambi-tion to defeat God and the angels is analogous to the aggressive imperial-ism of Eastern emperors such as the Ottoman sultan. According to thispattern of associations, the West is angelic; the East is demonic. Althoughthis example of demonization is from a text that might be placed in themodern category of “fiction,” it is, in many ways, a typical example of howIslamic powers were associated with evil and represented by European writ-ers in both literary and nonliterary forms. Milton’s depiction of Satan isbased upon a predominantly (but not entirely) negative and hostile attitudetoward Islamic culture, a deeply imbedded way of thinking about the Ori-ent that was (and still is) prevalent in the West.44

Western representations of Islamic power are not always derogatory ornegative; the European image of Islam is contradictory, containing both pos-itive and negative features. For example, Milton’s presentation of Satan’spower and fortitude in Books I and II depicts Satan as a heroic leader whoremains firm in his epic resistance in spite of his defeat and fall. Like the Ot-toman regime, which maintained its power despite major defeats such as thebattle of Ankara (the defeat of Bayazid by Timurlane) in 1402 and the navalbattle at Lepanto in 1570, Satan rallies his army of devils and unites themin a continued effort to defy the forces of Good. Like Satan, the Ottomansultan was seen as a figure of tyranny, pride, and pomp leading an evil em-pire in a violent effort to conquer Christendom and extinguish the truefaith; but at the same time, his imperial accomplishments were admired,even envied by European observers. For example, Sir Henry Blount, in anaccount of his travels in the Levant, writes, “He who would behold thesetimes in their greatest glory could not find a better Scene than Turkey . . .[The Turks] are the only moderne people, great in action . . . whose Empirehath so suddenly invaded the world, and fixt itself such firme foundationsas no other ever did.”45 For Blount, and for many other Christians in Eu-rope, the vast wealth, absolute power, and steadfast discipline of the Islamicruler and his loyal, united followers were causes for wonder and esteem.46

Milton’s association of Satanic power that the Ottoman sultanate alsodraws upon an image of oriental despotism which was available in classical andHebraic texts. In the Old Testament and in Greek and Roman legends and his-tories, the Eastern emperor is an autocrat who rules as God’s scourge ratherthan by divine right. His tyrannical power is produced by violence and basedon fear; he is implacable, paranoid, and utterly self-interested. Examples of


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such despots include Egyptian pharaohs, as well as the Babylonian and Persiankings of ancient times.

The image of the Eastern emperor found in the Bible and in classicaltexts was easily adapted to describe the Islamic caliph or Ottoman sultan.These Muslim rulers were then represented as tyrants who exercise an ab-solute and arbitrary power, especially over life and death. They are irrationaland unjust, fond of beheading and other cruel forms of punishment and tor-ture (the Ottoman sultans who murdered their own brothers are often men-tioned). Their power is a menace to be feared and fought; they are invadersplotting to overrun Christendom.

In Book V, canto 8, of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene(1594), Spenser’s hero, Arthur, fights and defeats an Islamic “Souldan,” anidolatrous, pagan tyrant who treacherously violates the chivalric codes ofhospitality and diplomacy, and uses his power unjustly to destroy virtue, ei-ther by force or by bribery. The Souldan is an archetype of “lawlesse powreand tortious wrong” (5.8.51). At the same time, he is an allegorical versionof Philip II of Spain, and the slaying of the Souldan by Arthur is symbolicof the English victory over the Spanish Armade of 1588. The Souldan ridesto battle in

. . . a charret [chariot] hye,With yron wheeles and hookes arm’d dreadfully,And drawn of cruel steedes, which he had fedWith flesh of men, whom through fell tyrannyHe slaughtered had, and ere they were halfe ded,Their bodies to his beasts for provedner did spred. (5.8.28)

Arthur is unable to reach him with his sword. It is only by divine grace (em-bodied in the magic power of Arthur’s crystal shield) that he is able to defeatthe Souldan, who is torn to pieces by his own horses—an image of oppressedsubjects rebelling against and destroying an unjust overlord. Spenser’s multi-layered allegory draws upon the traditional signification of Islamic-Orientaltyranny, as well as the association of papal power with Eastern/Turkish idol-atry and injustice, to make the claim that the Protestant cause is one of “ho-nour” and “right” (5.8.30), as opposed to the pride and despotism of bothIslam and Roman Catholicism.

Closely related to the stereotypical conception of oriental kingship arethe ideas of vast wealth and sensual luxury. These tend to be personal fea-tures of the Eastern potentate represented by the West, but they also refer tocommercial realities—particularly the huge profits that could be made trad-ing in the Islamic ports of the southern and eastern Mediterranean.47 Valu-able luxury goods came to Europe from the East, including silk, carpets,


spices, gold, and incense. European writers, like Mandeville, wrote of thespectacular, exotic wealth and splendor that was allegedly to be found in thecourts of African and Asian princes. Accounts of vast riches are found inmany early modern “descriptions” of foreign lands and palaces, includingdescriptions of the seraglio of the “Great Turk” in Istanbul.48 Such images ofOriental wealth provided material for the spectacle of Renaissance theaterand court masque. In Robert Greene’s heroic play Orlando Furioso (1594),to cite just one example, Orlando plans to defeat his Saracen foes and returnto France for a wedding, his ship is laden with luxury goods:

Our Sailes of Sendell spread into the winde;Our ropes and tacklings all of finest silk,Fetcht from the native loomes of labouring wormes,The pride of Barbarie, and the glorious wealthThat is transported by the Westerne bounds;Our stems cut out of gleaming ivories;Our planks and sides framde out of Cypresse wood,. . . So rich shall be the rubbish of our Barkes,Tane here for ballas to the ports of France,That Charles himself shall wonder at the sight.(11. 1586–1601)

This fabulous version of “venture capitalism” is a fantasy based upon the lu-crative adventures of real merchants such as Roger Bodenham, whose 1550voyage to Candia (Crete) and Chios is recorded in Hakluyt’s Principal Nav-igations (1598–1600), and includes hair-breadth escapes and skirmisheswith Turkish galleys.49

The Mediterranean was the setting for many “true” stories about Islamicpower at sea and in the commercial ports controlled by the Ottomans.Printed accounts of Turkish or Barbary galleys attacking Christian mer-chants present and confirm the Western stereotype that associates Islam withacts of violence, treachery, cruelty, and wrath. In literature and legend, Is-lamic “Saracens,” “Turks,” and “Moors” frequently appear as ranting, irra-tional, fanatical killers who practice treachery, oath-breaking,double-dealing, enslavement, piracy, and terrorism. From the Saracenknights of medieval romance to the Barbary pirates and Turkish pashas ofearly modern “report,” tales of hostage-taking and captivity have been em-phasized in Western narratives about the Islamic world.50 In medieval andearly modern narratives, these Islamic villains usually come to a violent end,howling obscene curses and shrieking as their souls go straight to hell.

Taking The Faerie Queene once again as an example, we encounter inBook I of Spenser’s epic three “paynim knights,” Sans Loy, Sans Joy, andSans Foy, allegorical representations of the evil and violence that result from


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faithlessness: they call on their “paynim” idols and then, in defeat, curse theirown gods for giving victory to Spenser’s hero, the Redcrosse knight. SansFoy appears in Book I of The Faerie Queene, accompanied by Duessa, thescarlet whore of Babylon who wears “a Persian mitre on her hed” (1.1.13).When Sans Foy encounters Redcrosse, he exclaims, “Curse upon thatCrosse . . . that keepes thy body from the bitter fit” (1.2.18). As a paganidolater, Sans Foy misinterprets the red crusader’s cross of St. George, think-ing that it is an amulet worn to avert evil, not an outward sign of the innerfaith that is the true source of Redcrosse’s strength. Sans Foy is given a death-blow by Redcrosse, and his soul is sent directly to hell: “his grudging ghostdid strive/With the fraile flesh; at last it flitted is,/Whither the soules do flyof men, that live amis” (1.2.19). In the next canto, his brother Sans Loy, a“proud Paynim . . . full of wrath” (1.3.35), appears seeking revenge. In theseepisodes and throughout Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser draws uponthe popular, romance tradition’s representation of Islam to supply his chival-ric allegory with images of false faith and exotic evil.

Sans Foy and Sans Loy are obviously and aggressively evil, and so Red-crosse is able to recognize and defeat them, but it is the disguised, seductiveevil of Duessa, the whore of Babylon, that leads Redcrosse into temptation,defeat, and imprisonment. His downfall is emphatically eroticized: it is asexual seduction accomplished by the oriental courtesan-sorceress Duessa,who is really a hideous hag, but uses her magic to appear beautiful. The de-scription of Duessa’s appearance after her triumph over Redcrosse is basedon Revelation 17:3–4: “I saw a woman sit upon a skarlat coloured beast, fullof names of blasphemie. . . . And the woman was araied in purple and skar-lat, and guilded with golde, and precious stones, and pearles” (GenevaBible). She is “great Babylon, the mother of whoredomes,” whose cup con-tains “the filth of her fornication.” Babylon is repeatedly identified withRome in the Geneva Bible’s marginal gloss to the Book of Revelation. Thegloss explains that she represents “the new Rome which is the Papistrie,whose crueltie and blood sheding is declared by skarlat,” but the place-name“Bablyon” also refers to Cairo and Baghdad, Islamic cities of great wealthand splendor. The Fall of Bablyon is the “fall of that great whore of Rome”that shall be accompanied by the fall of “all strange religions, as of the Jews,Turks and others” (Geneva Bible commentary, 16:19).

Spenser’s representation of oriental evil relies upon Protestant readings ofRevelation, but it also derives its significance from the traditional Westernrepresentation of Islamic society in the Levant. The private life of wealthyArabs, Moors, and Turks was said to be one of hidden sin, and their housesand palaces were described as locations for unbridled sensuality, exotic eroti-cism, lust, and lechery. In European descriptions of Islamic society, theharem, polygamy, and concubinage are frequently presented as if they were


universally practiced by the Muslims. As Samuel Chew has observed, “Theinterest of Europeans centered with a natural though often prurient curios-ity upon the Seraglio . . . because in it were practiced, or were reported to bepracticed, barbarous cruelties and extravagant sensualities which were nonethe less frequently described for being characterized as indescribable.”51

Courtly, upper-class customs (especially those of the Ottoman ruling class)were best known by European readers and so published reports that claimedto describe the seraglio and the harem produced an image of Islamic sexual-ity that made the Ottoman sultan’s palace a proverbial site for sexual excess,sadistic entertainments, and private, pornographic spectacle. When Edgar,in Shakespeare’s King Lear, recites his sins and speaks of his sexual excesses,he claims that he had “in woman, out-paramoured the Turk” (3.4.92).

Both sexual excess and sexual repression are emphasized in Western ac-counts of Eastern sexuality. The notion of a veiled, hidden lust that mas-querades as virtue and chastity (Duessa, the whore of Babylon, being anexample of this) is typically a characteristic of the Islamic woman in West-ern European texts. The virtuous Muslim woman often converts to Chris-tianity, “saved” by the love of a good Christian man.52

In medieval and Renaissance accounts of Islam, “Mahomet’s paradise” isdescribed as a false vision of sexual and sensual delights with its nubilehouris, rivers of wine, and luxurious gardens. One such account of Islamiceschatology is found in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (a text that beganto circulate in manuscript around 1356–66). Mandeville approves the Is-lamic belief in heaven, hell, and divine judgment, and goes so far as to findgreat compatibility between Islamic and Christian doctrine, but he finds theMuslims’ description of paradise to be one of their major errors:

if they are asked what paradise they are talking about, they say it is a place of de-lights, where a man shall find all kinds of fruit at all seasons of the year, and riversrunning with wine, and milk, and honey, and clear water; they say they will havebeautiful palaces and fine great mansions, according to their desserts, and thatthese palaces and mansions are made of precious stones, gold and silver. Everyman shall have four score wives, who will be beautiful damsels, and he shall liewith them whenever he wishes, and he will always find them virgins.53

Christian writers not only criticized Islam for offering sensual pleasure as areward to the virtuous in the next life, they also condemned the sexual free-dom allowed in this life under Muslim law. Islamic regulations governingconcubinage, marriage, and divorce were misunderstood and reviled byWestern Europeans.54 Alexandre du Pont, in his Roman de Mahomet, main-tains that the Prophet permitted every Muslim man to marry ten wives, andevery Muslim woman to marry ten times as well.55 According to John Pory,


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who translated Leo Africanus’s History and Description of Africa into Englishin 1600, the religious law of Muhammad “looseth the bridle to the flesh,which is a thing acceptable to the greatest part of men.”56 Pory and othersclaimed that the attraction of conversion to Islam—and the reluctance ofMuslims to convert to Christianity—was based primarily upon the greatersexual freedom allowed under Islamic law.

The alleged sexual excesses of the Muslims or Turks were linked to thoseof the Moors or Black Africans, who are frequently described in the Westerntradition as a people naturally given to promiscuity.57 Leo Africanus says ofthe North African Moors that there is “no nation under heaven more proneto venerie. . . .”58

“White” Europeans interpreted the blackness of the Moors as a sign of in-born evil. The Christian myth that explains the origins of the dark-skinnedraces, including the Moorish Muslims of Africa, is derived from the Old Tes-tament story of Ham (or Cham), son of Noah, who was cursed for beholdingthe nakedness of his father. Ham was said to be the original progenitor of theblack races, whose skin color was the outward sign of an inherited curse, vis-ited upon Ham and his offspring by God. Furthermore, the black or dark skinof Moors and other Muslim people of color was compared by fair-skinned Eu-ropeans with the color of the devils, burnt black by the flames of hell.

The stage Moor of early modern Europe was an actor in blackface. Whena “Moor” like Shakespeare’s Othello appeared on the London stage in thesixteenth or seventeenth centuries, he was essentially an emblematic figure,not a “naturalistic” portrayal of a particular ethnic type.59 As John Gillies re-minds readers of Othello, “ . . . the sharper, more elaborately differentiatedand more hierarchical character of post-Elizabethan constructions of racialdifference are inappropriate to the problems posed by the Elizabethanother.”60 Othello is not to be identified with a specific, historically accurateracial category; rather, he is a dramatic symbol of a dark, threatening powerat the edge of Christendom. As such, Othello the Moor is associated with awhole set of related terms—“Moor,” “Turk,” “Ottomite,” “Saracen,” “Ma-hometan,” “Egyptian,” “Judean,” “Indian”—all constructed in opposition toChristian faith and virtue.

Looking particularly at the significance of Othello’s epithet, “the Moor,”G. K. Hunter describes how this term was understood:

“The word ‘Moor’ had no clear racial status” to begin with; “its first meaningin the O.E.D. is ‘Mahmoden,’” which itself meant merely “infidel,” “non-Christian,” “barbarian.” “Moors were, as foreign infidels, virtually equivalentto Turks: ‘the word “Moor” was very vague enthnographically, and very oftenseems to have meant little more than ‘black-skinned outsider,’ but it was not


vague in its antithetical relationship to the European norm of the civilizedwhite Christian.”61

The Moors of North Africa were identified with Islam, and the term“Moor” (along with its cognates in other European languages) is one of awhole group of terms that were lumped together and associated, in theminds of early modern Europeans, with the worship of Mahomet. Thewords “Moor” and “Turk” were sometimes used with a specific reference tothe people of Turkey or Morocco, but more often they signified a general-ized Islamic Other.

Whether imagined as a black-skinned African Moor, or as a robed andturbaned Turk, the physical, external difference of the Islamic Other wasoften read as a sign of demonic darkness and barbaric ignorance. This pointmay be linked to one more aspect of Western stereotyping—the representa-tion of Saracens, Moors, and Turks as embodiments of evil. We have seenthis already in representations of evil that exhibit Islamic, “oriental” features(such as Spenser’s depiction of the Saracen brothers and Duessa, or Milton’ssultanic Satan), but the stereotype is also employed directly to reveal the sup-posed iniquity of Islam and to portray Islamic people as agents of evil.

As we have seen, Islam’s purported evil is sometimes radically demonizedand made into a monster. On other occasions, it is associated with the evilof black magic, occult power, and the worship of devils or idols, but suchrepresentations usually occur in popular culture, or in societies that had lit-tle direct contact with Islamic culture. For more learned Europeans whowere placed in closer proximity to North Africa or to the lands ruled by theOttoman Turks, it was difficult to demonize Islam in such a way. As JackD’Amico has observed,

the problem of containing Islam, politically and intellectually, was made moredifficult by those respects in which Islamic culture was actually superior. . . .A more potent and seductive foe, Islam had to be represented as a dangerousdistortion of the true Church, a parody of civilization, its Mohammed a falseprophet, its Jihad a perversion of the Crusade, its book, the Koran, a collec-tion of errors and lies that mocked the Bible.62

Nonetheless, there were Europeans who rejected both the popular andlearned demonizations of Islam: not all Europeans believed in the accuracyof the negative stereotypes. Some of those who traveled to the Islamic world,observing the achievements and institutions of that culture with their owneyes, were able to praise rather than revile. For example, the French travelerJean Thevenot, who went to Turkey in 1652, observed:


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There are many in Christendom who believe that the Turks are great devils,barbarians, and people without faith, but those who have known them andwho have talked with them have quite a different opinion; since it is certainthat the Turks are good people who follow very well the commandment givenus by nature, only to do to others what we would have done to us.63

And the French philosopher Jean Bodin, writing in the sixteenth century, re-ported that:

The King of the Turks, who rules over a great part of Europe, safeguards therites of religion as well as any prince in the world. Yet, he constrains no one,but on the contrary permits everyone to live as his conscience dictates. Whatis more, even in his seraglio at Pera he permits the practice of four diverse re-ligions, that of the Jews, the Christians according to the Roman rite, and ac-cording to the Greek rite, and that of Islam.64

Such views, however, were rare and were not usually shared by those Euro-peans who did not have the chance to visit the Middle East. It was not untilthe second half of the seventeenth century that voices in favor of tolerationand openness toward Islam were widely heard.65

Unfortunately, the demonization of Islam and misunderstanding of Is-lamic society and religion that this essay recounts are still prevalent in thedominant ideology of the West. Today, many of the stereotypes describedabove continue to shape the image of Islam produced by the mass media inNorth America, Europe, and other parts of the world.66 If we examine, inparticular, the American representations of Islam in mass media journalismduring the last 10 or 15 years, we will find ample evidence for an unbrokentradition depicting Islamic people as violent, cruel, wrathful, lustful, and soon. With the end of the Cold War, America needed a new ideological bogeyman to serve as an alleged external threat; and perhaps this explains the re-cent resurgence of anti-Islamic imagery, a revival that draws upon a venera-ble tradition of anti-Islamic demonization that began in the medieval periodand acquired some of its present features in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies.

Notes

1. For detailed information about these authors and their works, consult Nor-man Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960).See also James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, 1964).

2. Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (NewHaven, Conn., 1977), 161. For further analyses of the romance tradition


in Europe and the depiction of Islamic figures in romance, see chapter 6,“History and Romance,” in Metlitzki; as well as Noman Daniel, Heroesand Saracens: An Interpretation of the “Chansons de Geste” (Edinburgh,1984); C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs ofGeste,” Speculum 17 (1942): 201–25; and two articles by William WistarComfort, “The Literary Role of the Saracen in the French Epic,” Proceed-ings of the Modern Language Association 55 (1940): 628–59, and “TheSaracens in Italian Epic Poetry,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Asso-ciation 59 (1994): 882–910.

3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978): “Quite literally, the [French]occupation [of Egypt in 1798] gave birth to the entire modern experience ofthe Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded byNapoleon in Egypt . . .” (87).

4. W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misper-ceptions (London, 1991), 88.

5. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York, 1989), 10.6. Amin, Eurocentrism, 10.7. Richard Knolles, History of the Turks (London, 1603).8. See Samuel C. Chew, “‘The Present Terror in the World,’” The Crescent and

the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York, 1937).9. A Short Forme of Thanksgiving to God for the Delyverie of the Isle of Malta

(1565), reprinted in Liturgical Services of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth: Litur-gies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,ed. William K. Clay (Cambridge, 1847).

10. Ibid., 522, 532–33.11. Correspondence of Sidney and Languet, ed. W. A. Bradley (Boston, 1912),

106.12. Coelius Augustinius Curio, A Notable History of the Saracens, trans. Thomas

Newton (London, 1575).13. Anonymous, The Policy of the Turkish Empire (London, 1597), A3v.14. See Dorothy M. Vaughan, Europe and the Turk: A Pattern of Alliances,

1350–1700 (Liverpool, 1954), 134.15. Mentioned in Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr., A Concise History of the Middle East,

3d ed. (Boulder, Co., 1988), 132.16. Vaughan, Europe and the Turk, 134–46; and Kenneth M. Setton,

“Lutheranism and the Turkish Peril,” Balkan Studies 3 (1962): 136–65.17. Vaughan, Europe and the Turk, 135.18. Franklin L. Baumer, “England, the Turk, and the Common Corps of Chris-

tendom,” American Historical Review 50 (1945): 26–48.19. Cited in Setton, “Lutheranism,” 151.20. William Gravet, A Sermon Preached at Paules Cross . . . intreating of the holy

Scriptures, and the use of the same (London, 1587), 50–51.21. Consult Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades (Chicago, 1988) and

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades (Cambridge, Mass., 1987) on the persis-tence of the crusading movement and crusading rhetoric into the sixteenth and


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seventeenth centuries. See Tyerman (359–70) on the rhetoric of crusade usedby both the English and the Spanish in their conflict during the sixteenth cen-tury. Of course, the papacy had frequently called for crusades against all formsof paganism and heresy, for example at the time of the Albigensian crusade.

22. Cited in Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 242.23. Reginald Pole, The seditious and blasphemous Oration of Cardinal Pole . . .

Translated into englysh by Fabyane Wythers (London, 1560) A3–3v. This wasoriginally written in Latin and published in 1536. It was entitled Pro Eccle-siasticae Unitatis Defensione. When Fabian Withers translated Cardinal Pole’sLatin into English in 1560, he included an anti-Catholic gloss that countersPole’s claim that the Protestants were infidels: “This is the general and nat-ural sense of all the popysh secte to count all them which have professed thegospell for turkes and worse than turkes . . .”(C1).

24. Cited in Kenneth M. Setton, Western Hostility to Islam and Prophecies ofTurkish Doom (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1992), 41–42.

25. Cited in Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 242.26. See the conclusions of Tyerman and Riley-Smith.27. Luis Vaz de Camoes, The Lusiads, trans. William K. Atkinson (London: Pen-

guin, 1952). 162–63.28. See Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, 4 vols.

(Philadelphia, 1976–84).29. Baumer, “England and the Turk,” 39.30. Cited in Baumer, 39.31. Sutton, Western Hostility, 41.32. The Policy, A3v–A4r.33. The Policy, B4v–B5r.34. See Nabil Matar, “‘Turning Turk’: Conversion to Islam in English Renais-

sance Thought,” Durham University Journal 86 (1994): 33–42.35. The most widely read captivity narratives of this time were certainly those of

the Croation Bartholomaeus Georgievicz, a nobleman taken prisoner by theTurks at the battle of Mohacs in 1526. He spent ten years as a slave in Is-tanbul, Thrace, and Asia Minor. His writings were printed in many editionsin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and translated into many lan-guages. See his De Turcarum moribus epitome (Lyon, 1553), which wasprinted more than a dozen times in the sixteenth century; and De afflictionetam captivorum quam etiam sub Turcae tributo viventium Christianorum(Antwerp, 1544). See also the captivity narratives included in Richard Hak-luyt’s Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), especially the sensational“worthy enterprises of John Fox an Englishman in delivering 266 Christiansout of the captivity of the Turks at Alexandria, the 3 of January 1577.”

36. Edward Webbe, The Rare and most wonderful thinges which Edward Webbean Englishman borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome travailes . . .(London, 1590; repr. 1869, ed. Edward Arber), 29.

37. See, for example, Andrew Barker, A true and certaine report of . . . the Es-tate of Captaine Ward and Danseker, the two late famous Pirates (London,


1609). For a comprehensive account of how these renegades were repre-sented in English culture, refer to Nabil Matar, “The Renegades in EnglishSeventeenth-Century Imagination,” Studies in English Literature 33(1993): 489–505.

38. On the literary treatment of the Turks in the Renaissance, see Samuel C.Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance(New York, 1937); Clarence D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History,Thought, and Literature, 1520–1660 (Paris, 1938); and Albert Mas, Les Turcsdans la Litterature Espagnole du Siecle d’Or, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967).

39. See Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, 160–92.40. Cited in Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, 392.41. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford, 1993), 7.42. On the polemical biography of Muhammad, see Norman Daniel, “The Life

of Muhammed” in Islam and the West; the section on “‘Mahomet and Mede’:The Treatment of Islam” in Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, 197–210; andchapter 9, “The Prophet and his Book” in Chew, The Crescent and the Rose.

43. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, ed. Robert Brown,trans. John Pory, 3 vols. (London, 1896), 3:1019.

44. It is important to note that this kind of dehumanization and demonization ofthe Other is not unique or inherent to Western thought or literature (as EdwardSaid and others sometimes imply). The West itself has often been the object ofsuch demonization on the part of non-Western cultures (including Islamic cul-ture’s representation of the “Great Satan,” America). Today, the West is partic-ularly distinguished in its dehumanization of the Other because it is adominant, global culture and power. Thus the West’s cultural mechanism of de-monization is more visible in the world and is perhaps a more damaging prob-lem, but it is certainly not a mechanism that operates in Western culture only.

45. Sir Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant (London, 1636), 2–3.46. See, for example, R. M., Learne of a Turke; or instructions and advise sent from

the Turkish Army at Constantinople to the English army at London (London,1660).

47. On the movement of merchant ships and commodities between Europe andthe Middle East during this period in the Mediterranean, see T. S. Willan,“Some Aspects of English Trade with the Levant in the Sixteenth Century,”English Historical Review 70 (1955): 399–410; and Ralph Davis, “Englandand the Mediterranean, 1570–1670,” in Essays in Economic and Social His-tory of Tudor and Stuart England in Honour of R. H. Tawney, ed. F. J. Fisher(Cambridge, 1961), 117–37.

48. See, for example, Robert Withers, A Description of the Grand Signor’sSeraglio, or the Turkish Emperor’s Court (London, 1650).

49. Reprinted in Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries, ed. Jack Beeching(New York, 1972), 52–55.

50. See Matar, “The Renegade in English Seventeenth-Century Imagination.”51. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, 192. For a few more summaries of such ac-

counts see idem, 192–95.


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52. See Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, 177ff.53. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed., C. W. R. D. Moseley (London,

1983), 104.54. See Daniel, Islam and the West, 135–40.55. Cited in Daniel, Islam and the West, 145.56. Leo Africanus, 3:1008.57. See Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa, Florida,

1991), 63ff; and Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in EnglishRenaissance Drama (London, 1965), 1–26.

58. History and Description of Africa, 1:180.59. For more information about the figure of the Moor on the London stage,

consult D’Amico, The Moor; Ruth Cowhig, “Blacks in English RenaissanceDrama and the Role of Shakespeare’s Othello,” in The Black Presence in Eng-lish Literature, ed. D. Dabydeen (Manchester, 1985); Elliot Tokson, ThePopular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston,1982); and Jones, Othello’s Countrymen.

60. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, 1994),32.

61. G. K. Hunter, “Othello and Colour Prejudice,” Proceedings of the BritishAcademy 53 (1967): 147.

62. D’Amico, The Moor, 75–76.63. Cited in Lewis, Islam and the West, 80.64. Cited in Paul Coles, The Ottoman Impact on Europe (New York, 1968), 151.65. See, for example, the authors cited in Nabil Matar, “Islam in Interregnum

and Restoration England,” The Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): 57–71.66. Edward Said has made this point eloquently and persuasively in his book,

Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See theWorld (London, 1981). See also John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Mythor Reality? (Oxford, 1992) for a more recent treatment of the subject.


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